An interstellar, alien meteor collided with Earth. This is what happened

Interstellar space lies beyond the solar system. Traditionally, we used telescopes to observe remotely what lies in our neighbour’s yard. But remote observing is limited to extremely bright or large objects. If we ever discover an interstellar car, similar to the dummy payload launched in 2018 by SpaceX, we would know that Elon Musk is not the most accomplished space entrepreneur since the Big Bang.

Over the past decade, astronomers discovered the first interstellar objects. As described in my book Interstellar, the first among them was an interstellar meteor named IM1, half a metre in size that collided with Earth on 8 January 2014. Outside the Solar System, IM1 was moving at 60 kilometres per second. Despite its high speed, it disintegrated in the lower atmosphere, where the air is dense. This implied that it was tougher than all meteors documented by Nasa over the past decade.

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It took my research team a full year to plan an expedition to the fireball site of IM1 in the Pacific Ocean. The location was determined by satellites from the US Department of Defense which detected the light from IM1’s brilliant fireball. 

Collecting molten meteoritic droplets from the ocean floor was particularly challenging because the ocean is a mile deep at that location and the search region is seven miles in size. Our team anchored a sled full of magnets to a ship called Silver Star and dragged it on the ocean floor across the survey region. We visited IM1’s impact site on 14-28 June 2023 and collected 850 tiny droplets, less than a millimetre each. 

It took us a year to analyse the droplets and we published our findings in a detailed, peer-reviewed paper. To all the critics of our work, I only say that collecting scientific evidence is the only way to gain new knowledge on our cosmic neighbourhood. 

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In the words of Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” 

Our analysis used state-of-the-art laboratory instruments to find that about a tenth of the total population of droplets had a chemical composition that had never been reported before in scientific literature. 

It is characterised by an enhanced abundance of certain chemical elements, such as beryllium (Be), lanthanum (La) and uranium (U), up to a thousand times more than the materials that made the Solar System. 

We labelled this special set BeLaU-type spherules. 

The BeLaU composition is unfamiliar and different from the composition of the crust of the Earth, Mars, the Moon, asteroids and comets and potentially flags an origin from outside the solar system. Its origin is unknown.

But curiosity-driven science never ends. Our analysis raises new questions: What is the age and material properties of IM1? Is IM1 natural or artificial in origin? Where did it come from and how long was its journey?  

We are currently planning our next expedition for summer 2025, with the goal of answering these questions. Aside from identifying the nature of IM1, finding large pieces from its wreckage would allow us to determine the age of IM1 from its radioactive isotopes, to find the composition of volatile elements that were lost from the spherules we retrieved, and also to gauge IM1’s material strength and thermal properties, potentially explaining why it maintained its integrity despite witnessing atmospheric stress beyond the tolerance of the toughest iron meteorites known in the Solar System.

To find larger pieces of IM1, we intend to use a robot named Hercules, accompanied by a video feed that would allow us to see what we are picking up. Stay tuned! Science can be exciting.

On 22 September, I spoke about the interstellar expedition at the world’s largest philosophy and music festival, How The Light Gets In, in London. I gave a simple answer to the title of this festival: the light gets in through the cracks of our prejudice by using evidence-based science.

Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future Beyond Earth by Avi Loeb is out now (Hachette, £20). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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